Biosensors & Bioelectronics

Chemically Modified Electrodes in Biosensing

Abstract

Anton Alexandru Ciucu

The development of chemical sensors has received a great deal of scientific interest in the last decades. Not only the chemical industry may benefit from these sensors but also the food industry, bio-industry, medicine, environmental control because of their capability to give continuously and reversibly a selective and fast response to the presence of a specific compound in a complex mixture of components, without perturbing the system. Biosensors combine the power of analytical detection techniques with the specificity of biological recognition system and therefore they are the most promising devices today about this selectivity. Furthermore, biosensors possess many unique features such as compact size, simplicity of use, one-step reagentless analysis, absence of radioactivity, etc., that make them very attractive alternatives to conventional bioanalytical techniques. The present short review highlights some modern aspects of Chemically Modified Electrodes (CMEs) based on redox enzymes used in amperometric biosensing, a detection method which has already found a large number of applications in health care, food industry and environmental analysis. Some relevant applications of amperometric biosensors based on CMEs to real sample analysis are also presented and some possible future trends highlighted.